Bit of a cliffhanger today, sorry to make you all wait ’til next week! :)

Thank you all so much for funding the printing of Book 2 through my Kickstarter campaign! As you may know, I have reached my goal, but you can still place pre-orders or support my work (you can have your name or face in the actual comic even!) there until the 27th! All extra proceeds will go to paying off the loans from printing book 1 and to the re-printing of Little Dee.

Red-9′s still on Carpsellon, though, and has more experience using her powers than these new Eebs have with theirs. It might not be so one-sided.

BTW, Christopher, I noticed that “Eeb” (1) is the pronunciation for the acronym EBE (Extraterrestrial Biological Entity, which I first heard used on “The X-Files”) and (2) rhymes with a racist slur used for Jews (starts with H). Just curious, are either or both connections intentional? Thanks.

For some reason I didn’t think the strip would get to the handful of Eeb escapees right away. I thought there’d be some sort of undercurrent where we’d be thinking “wow, that was some explosion, did the Eebs do that?” or “hm, that character’s acting really odd, are the Eebs doing that?” Oh well. :-)

Nogg’s pretty strong to be carrying Gurf with one arm like that. Since it’s actually GURF’S job to be the muscle, Gurf must be really really quite strong.

The fact that one can apparently just land on a GOB planet (some of ‘em, anyway) without going through any sort of customs (barbaric or otherwise) — seems it’s like going from town to town — suggests that at least Martina will be able to travel from planet to planet without much hassle. So that’s nice.

If anyone were to ask (as if), I’d suggest that Emily get a bit more development in the near future. I mean, she was raised by COYOTES, that’s AFAIK the only sf/f element that any human character had even before being abducted. Moderately interesting fact: Did you know that coyotes are one of the few animals whose range of activity has actually EXPANDED as a result of human encroachment, in part due to human extermination of wolves and coyotes’ ability to adapt to life in metropolitan areas? Apparently city-building didn’t so much run coyotes out of the wild as bring them INTO the cities. They also occasionally “ally” with badgers to chase prey both above ground and underground (the badgers handling the latter), and then share the meal.

Speaking of dark humor, since folk singer Taylor Mitchell (a woman) is the only adult (age 19) known to have been killed in a coyote attack, perhaps Emily listens to her music now and then as sort of a, you know, “yeah, that was kinda out of line, all right, sorry” gesture.

ronald: Asking if the name of an alien race is meant to rhyme with a racial slur seems like crossing a line somehow. (Especially since the aliens don’t share any particular similarities with the racial group in question.)

My apologies, I didn’t intend to cross a line, I just thought possibly it was a veiled acknowledgement of how the GOB’s treatment of Eebs could be perceived as analogous to the persecution of Jews and other Earth ethnicities. I noticed the word “Eeb”‘s THEORETICAL significance in that respect almost as soon as I started reading the strip. I wasn’t looking for it, I just…noticed it, that’s all. It was clueless of me to ask the question without realizing its potential for offense, and I’m sorry.

Even if the rhyme is intentional, I certainly don’t think that Christopher intended it in any sort of racist context whatsoever. If I in any way gave that impression, again, my deep and sincere apologies.

3) Suddenly Dmitri and the nice Eebs pop up out of the ground in their beer-making-underground-drilling-vehicle, and they invite everybody to jump aboard.

4) Together they head back into the depths and safely wait out the rain of fire (which the evil Eeb said would “melt every last thing on the surface,” implying that what’s below the surface would be safe.)

5) Our heroes and heroines eventually come up from beneath the surface, get out and look around at the horror surrounding them on a planet-wide scale, and the storyline as a whole continues on its dark and depressing course into the indefinite future, with two aspects of hope — (a) Yuki is damn powerful now, and (b) we know at least Nogg survives to tell the story.

By the way, I’m beginning to wonder if Martina’s body being sent into the sun upon her death results in all the evil Eebs following it, thinking she’s still alive, and that’s how they die, too. Maybe Yuki makes the sun go nova or something while they’re there. Pure speculation at this point, though, but the way things have been going lately, I have no reason to believe that ANYBODY but Nogg lives by the end of the story.

Whatever the case, without hope, the storyline becomes too depressing to bear, so I’m clinging on to my ideas for now until we see what Chris pulls out of his hat. *smiles and bites my lip yet again*

Well, no worries *now*, but I was sort of stressed for a while there. ;-) Thanks.

***

On another note, there’s been no indication that Carpsellon is heavily populated — for all we know it’s just the GOB base and the Kppfing Hotel with a few adjacent businesses — but I guess you’ll show us soon enough.

Man, I am loving that Eeb’s sense of dress code. And unibrow. And throne.

Very Olympian. :) (Well, except for maybe the unibrow.)

Interesting to see that it’s Crimson-57–the very first Eeb set free by Red-9. Also interesting to see that, despite throwing off the shackles of slavery, he is still being named by the pattern we’ve seen so far.

For that matter is that pattern a part of the GOB attempt to keep them as less-than-sentient, by giving them these strange unpersonal names? Or does the weirdness of Eeb naming conventions just come from automatic-translation-weirdness a la Star Control II’s Orz? (“It is always! Nnnnggaaahhhhh! There is *juice squeezing* and then we are not so *frumple*.”, which, together with “Again I am *squeezing* the *juice*. Nnnggaaaahhh!! It does not even helping.”)

That long, drawn-out aside… aside, I think I am starting to see how Martina goes out.

Apropos of nothing, it occurred to me that Dustin is relatively unique in popular culture in that, despite being an Australian jerk, he is apparently NOT prejudiced against blacks. At least, as seen in http://spacetrawler.com/2011/03/01/spacetrawler7eruy3g/ he seems at ease with the notion of being pals/peers with Pierrot, he just hasn’t caught on that Pierrot dislikes him for reasons that have nothing to do with race.

course, all that thinking about Eeb names now has me wondering what the literal dialogue is that translates into human as “pain of morning-after-spicy-meal-poo.” I mean… do all alien races even have digestive tract analogues? ;)

@Tapestry, good eye! Actually, in the original drawings for today’s strip he was totally untied. I noticed and redrew his arms and then looked back and noticed it was wrong in his last appearance as well! and have made a note to fix it (long “things to do” list). But thank you! I totally almost overlooked it. It’s so good to have backup eyes.

IMHO keeping Dusty tied up in these circumstances is just a little bit gratuitous on the part of the other characters. I mean, what’s he gonna do, betray them to the *corpses*?

Ironically, if Dusty “escaped” the crew at this point, his survival chances would be almost nil. Even aside from the whole “the Eebs are going to destroy the planet” thing, he’s a wanted fugitive just like the rest of them, except with no discernible skills, no esoteric knowledge applicable to hiding (what, HE’S gonna know what are the best planets to lay low on? I don’t think so), and nothing to offer the authorities in exchange for freedom (he probably wouldn’t even make a good GOB pawn at this point). Theoretically, the rest of the crew could hotwire the ship and split and just leave him standing there like an idiot. But they won’t.

@Kathleen, Ha! Sorry about that. Couldn’t save the universe with one more book to do, they’d have nothing to do but play cards and drink lemonade. I can see the critics, “the first two books were pretty exciting, but suddenly in book three it went from Star Wars to Seinfeld.” ;-)

Panel 8: I actually had that kind of a moment couple of times. It is one of these rare feelings you have to be quick in order to survive the coming shitty fan incident and even though there’s nothing funny in the situation you still laugh like a maniac.